Roadmap for Active Travel Infrastructure in Whitby district

Background

Whitby district has average levels of uptake of walking, though some of the lowest levels of cycling in the county. Walking infrastructure lacks safe crossings in many places, as well as basic footpaths in other areas. Cycle infrastructure is virtually non-existent, with just the Cinder Track, a leisure route, being available for anything approaching safe cycling – the core reason why uptake is so low.

The YNYLEP’s Routemap to Carbon Negative (2022) defined a need to rebalance the transport systems of the county to reduce car usage by 48% whilst increasing walking by 40% and cycling by 900%, and all to be achieved by 2030 in order to have a chance of the overall longer term goal of net zero, with increased active travel being a strategic priority for 2022-2027. In the period 2022-2026 Whitby district received precisely £0 investment in active travel infrastructure.

Plan for the future?

The prerequisite for any upgrade to active travel infrastructure is a Local Cycling Walking Infrastructure Plan (LCWIP). When NYCC handed out the funding for these documents in 2019 Whitby was provided with nothing, and indeed NYCC / NYC showed no suggestion that they would ever provide one. Our campaigning finally resulted in NYC agreeing to fund this document in 2023 (and Thirsk on the back of what we suggested their strategy should be).

The Whitby LCWIP was finally adopted in May 2025 – 5 years after the majority of other larger towns in the county.

Current status

NYC have not bid for funding for any Whitby district active travel scheme. Whilst NYCC did bid for an ATF2 scheme from Whitby Park-and-Ride (something that would be of no value to any Whitby resident, and consequently very low priority) in 2021 this was subsequently ditched and Harrogate was given the funding instead.

All schemes in the Whitby LCWIP are still at the start point, with none having entered any form of design stage.

The end result of this is that schemes for the town are effectively at the “back of the queue”, and indeed not available for funding from many funding sources (which will only fund the delivery of schemes), so realistically nothing will be delivered for years – we seriously doubt there will be any change by the supposed achievement date of 2030, let alone 900% increase in cycling and 40% in walking. Pathetic really.

Alternatives to Infrastructure

The only other way to provide any form of safety for people wishing to walk and cycle in Whitby would be to provide zones that are 20mph. We developed a proposal for this for all residential areas in the town [link], obtained unanimous support from the town council, but whilst one NYC councillor (Cllr Swannick, Whitby Streonshalh) did support it, the other NYC councillor (Cllr Trumper, Whitby West) would not, seemingly down to ideological reasons about 20mph. This prevented us applying it to some of the primary walk and cycle to school residential estates in the town all situated in “Whitby West”. Pursuing it for “Whitby Streonshalh” exposed the NYC policy of not being willing to apply it to estates where they considered that traffic calming would be needed (without significant cost – up to £100k for the Eskdale/Larpool estate alone).

The barriers to this alternative are

• NYC’s unwillingness to contemplate signage-only 20mph schemes, with a desire to have vertical infrastructure – despite the evidence that even with a signage-only scheme there is an initial drop in average speeds of around 2mph, enough to reduce road collisions by around 20%.
• Unwillingness of an NYC councillor to “support” such a scheme that would directly benefit walk and cycle to school, despite also being a governor of the secondary school.

Funding

Whilst the Y&NY Mayoral Active Travel Fund (MATF) does not exclude funding the design phase of schemes, it would also require provision of a roadmap for delivery of the full scheme. We would, understandably, not be able to provide that, and NYC were seemingly unable when we posed the question to them regarding one potential LCWIP scheme [link].

The MATF is, as a consequence, effectively of no value to us, since infrastructure is our primary barrier. Unless the MATF is restructured in future rounds to permit some form of support for design phases, we will not be applying for anything from it due to this reason.

Whilst we, as a charity, will continue to pursue funding to be able to push forward the LCWIP schemes into design, so that one day we can envisage having a “pipeline of schemes”, this is unlikely to be realised any time soon. We would like to believe that NYC will provide a scheme one day.

Our question is, given all of the above and given NYC knowing its DfT funding for the next 3 years, what is the roadmap (or even the start of a roadmap) for Whitby district ever having active travel INFRASTRUCTURE, so that the supposed target for the “Routemap to Carbon Negative” is anything more than just another vacuous political promise / mistruth?

Whitby & Esk Valley Active Travel